Hike Bike Paddle Camp Florida with authors Sandra Friend and John Keatley as your guides
Starting with a riverwalk along Lake Monroe, historic Sanford provides an excellent gateway to outdoor recreation along the St. Johns River north of Orlando
INTERACTIVE MAP
A patch of wild in a sea of suburbia, Bear Creek provides nearly a mile’s worth of exploration atop sandy bluffs in a shady creekside hammock in Winter Springs.
Visiting this Seminole County preserve for the first time, a string of excellent wildlife sightings culminates in seeing three bears at the trailhead.
While the iconic Senator is no more, Big Tree Park continues to fascinate visitors with its enormous cypress trees, including Lady Liberty. The park provides access to the Cross Seminole Trail.
Using Beck Ranch Park as our launch point for a cycling adventure in Osteen, we discovered how easy it was to stitch together the local network of bike paths into a pleasant ride, with the Osteen Diner right at hand for lunch.
While biking the Flagler Trail from Geneva Wilderness to Snow Hill Road, John discovers a few useful lessons in being prepared for what can happen on a bike ride through the woods
North of Orlando, Black Bear Wilderness Area in Sanford offers some of the best wildlife watching in the region on its loop along the St. Johns River.
Trot out your sense of adventure for an immersion into one of the wildest trails you’ll find near Orlando, the 7.1-mile loop in the Black Bear Wilderness Area in Sanford.
Discover the beauty of the St. Johns River floodplain along this 2 mile round-trip to the rivers edge in wildlife-rich Black Bear Wilderness Area
Black Hammock is a bit of Old Florida in Oviedo, with a trail showcasing a delightfully long boardwalk and a loop through scrub habitats above Lake Jesup
Blue Spring State Park is well acclaimed for being the best place in Florida to see manatees in the wild, and we don’t mean a dozen or two. Upwards of 200 crowd spring run each winter.
If you’ve never seen manatees by the dozens, let alone over a hundred, there’s no better place to watch them than along the boardwalk at Blue Spring State Park in wintertime
September is the time to see swamp sunflowers in bloom, and there’s no better in-your-face place to see them up close in the Orlando area than Lake Jesup Wilderness in Sanford.
